The Glimpses of the Moon (15 page)

However, Padmore, Dermot McCartney and the Major were not, they saw, destined to watch Thouless excel himself immediately. (Or, as it turned out, ever.) The machine had just been pre-empted by Ortrud Youings.

It was a massive machine, traditional in design. With a long-handled mallet, you hit a metal plate set in the base-box, thus activating an arrangement of springs, cogs and levers which propelled a lead weight up a graduated slot in the tall central column; if you were lucky, the weight hit the bell at the top and you received a prize - a kewpie doll or a metal teapot or twenty Players or a psychedelic balloon, to judge from the adjacent display.

The machine was supervised, and indeed owned, by a fat barker called Arthur, well advanced in years, who stood beside it swaying benignly from side to side, the neck of a depleted whisky bottle projecting from a pocket of his raincoat.

‘Come and watch the little lady!' he bawled hoarsely, ignoring the fact that Ortrud Youings was as tall, if not as obese, as he was himself. ‘Walk up! Walk up! Come on along and watch the little lady ring the bell!'

Ortrud Youings had taken off her jacket and given it to her husband, who was standing close to her with a love-sick smirk on his otherwise not unintelligent face; the onlookers saw the muscles ripple in her smooth white arms as she hefted the mallet. Grasping it firmly in both hands, she swung it slowly back over her right shoulder, then forward again, with lightning speed and colossal force, down on to the metal plate.

The entire machine seemed to totter at the impact. The plate crashed down on to the base-box, the cogs groaned and the lead weight shot up the slot like a bullet, hitting the bell with a clang which momentarily drowned even the Whirlybirds. But there was more. Though solidly built from mahogany, round about the turn of the century, the machine had since then been sapped by decades of hard use and weathering, and a transverse crack had gradually developed in its column just beneath the vertex of the bell. Strained to crisis point by Ortrud Youings's tremendous blow, this crack now rapidly widened, and with a splintering
of wood, to a hullabaloo of shrieks, gasps and shouted warnings, the top of the column sagged and broke away altogether. Bell and all, it plummeted earthward, catching its owner Arthur a glancing blow on the side of the head and collapsing him on to the turf, where he lay stunned, bleeding profusely from a wound in his scalp above his right ear.

The instantly ensuing commotion featured a single, rather ghastly, incongruity: wholly ignoring the unfortunate Arthur's fate - for which, though unintentionally, she had after all been responsible - Ortrud Youings dropped the mallet, clasped her hands above her head, brandished them back and forth like a victorious prize-fighter, and shouting ‘
Juchhe! Juchhe!',
made for the prizes display, where she appropriated a teapot and proceeded to brandish that. His devotion temporarily quenched by her appalling behaviour, Youings seized his wife without gentleness and lugged her out of the way of the numerous people who were meanwhile milling round the recumbent Arthur, intent on administering help.

‘Doc Mason!' a man shouted. ‘Someone find Doc Mason!'

‘ 'E'm gone,' someone else bellowed. ‘Saw en drive off, not ten minutes since.'

‘Well then, fetch First Aid Box!'

Two youths, twin brothers called Hulland, volunteered to do this. Side by side, they left the scene at a measured trot. In the interim, Dermot McCartney - partly because he seemed calmer and more confident than anyone else, and partly, no doubt, as an illogical result of people's frequent exposure to coloured doctors in hospitals - had been accepted as chief ministering angel. Down on one knee, he raised the injured man's head an inch or two, probing gently with his fingers at the place where the wound was. Arthur stirred; he moaned; he made an attempt to sit up; he wasn't, at any rate, dead.

‘He'll do,' Dermot McCartney told the circle of concerned onlookers, cheerfully.

‘Even so, we'd probably better get the doctor,' said the Major. ‘If he's gone straight home, he ought to be there by now. Thouless, my dear fellow, would you ring him up from my flat? You'll be quicker than I shall. The door's open, and the number's on the pad beside the telephone. Mind and not let
Sal out, or we shall have more casualties.' Thouless nodded importantly and strode off towards the house. As he passed the fortune-telling tent, the Rector emerged from it carrying his cricket bag, with Fen at his heels.

The Hulland twins had by now arrived at their destination, the Botticelli tent;
en route
on the trot, they had thrown out brief explanations to the groups of people who were drifting, curious, towards the source of the disturbance. The sign on the Botticelli tent said Vacant. Titty Bale was still at the receipt of custom, and Luckraft with his crash helmet on was still sitting on guard opposite her.

‘First Aid Box,' said one Hulland twin, panting.

‘Been an accident,' said the other.

‘Chap hit on the head,' said the first.

‘Bleeding all over the grass,' said the second.

‘Oh
dear,
oh dear,' said Titty Bale, frowning. Neither she nor her sister Tatty (who was presumably still faithfully on watch at the back of the tent) had ever really approved of the custom that had grown up over the years, of storing bits and pieces in the Botticelli tent, behind the black velvet against which the Assumption was suspended. ‘Well, fortunately there's no one Meditating just at present. Even so, I shall have to speak to the dear Rector about it. It's quite ridiculous to keep the First Aid Box
here,
and I shall tell him so … No, no, you two stay out here. I'll fetch it.' She got up and went into the tent, leaving the Hullands explaining matters to Luckraft.

Time passed - a matter of two minutes only, but to the Hullands this seemed (as indeed it was) needlessly long. Then Titty Bale reappeared through the tent flap. She had no First Aid Box with her. Moreover, she was moving slowly, and looked pale.

As they stared questioningly at her, ‘Luckraft,' she said, speaking with some difficulty, ‘there's a man in there.'

‘A man, Miss Bale?'

‘Yes. He's dead.'

‘Dead?'

‘Yes, dead. And Luckraft, it's happened
again,'
Titty Bale said faintly. She went back to her chair and slumped down into it. ‘Hagberd has been put away, but it's happened
again?'

They continued to stare at her, wordlessly.

‘The man is not only dead,' said Titty Bale, articulating with all possible care. ‘He has also been … been mutilated. That's to say, he's - that is to say, someone has cut off his head.'

Collapsed in her wood-and-canvas garden chair, she added, ‘Incidentally, he is completely naked. In searching for the First Aid Box, I lifted a sheet of tarpaulin, or some such material -and there he was, bare as the minute he was born.'

Alarmed, Luckraft surged to his feet. That must have been very distressing for you, Miss Titania,' he said.

The nakedness? Pah!' Luckraft's concern for her spinsterly sensibilities re-aroused some of Miss Bale's mettle. ‘Rubbish, Luckraft, rubbish! Let me tell you, I've seen a great many naked men in my time.'

‘Oh, have you, Miss Titania?' said Luckraft feebly.

‘Yes, I have. I dare say I've seen more naked men than you've had hot dinners.'

Luckraft shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. ‘Gracious,' was all he could find by way of response.

‘There is nothing -
nothing,
Luckraft - that I don't know about naked men.'

‘No, I'm sure not, Miss Titania. All I was -'

‘Nursing, Luckraft, nursing. Nearly twenty years of it I had, when I was younger. And you don't do a stretch like that without getting to know everything there is to know about naked men, do you now, Luckraft?'

‘Well, no, Miss Titania, I suppose not.' Luckraft squared his shoulders. ‘Now, if you'll just let me - '

‘Yes, but be careful, Luckraft.' Titty's brief outbreak of animation was now apparently exhausted; she began to fidget nervously with her untidy grey hair. ‘There is evil in there.'

‘Just so, Miss Titania. And it's my business to -'

‘No, no, Luckraft, you misunderstand me. The murder is evil, true. The mutilation is evil, certainly. But what is even worse is that they happened in the presence - or virtually the presence - of the Botticelli.'

‘And you think that that's -'

‘I regard it as the worst evil of all. It is profanation, Luckraft - Profanation. It is the Unforgivable Sin.'

‘I'll bear that in mind, of course, Miss Titania. And now -'

‘In fact,' said Titty, ‘I think it may even be necessary to ask the dear Bishop to re-consecrate the picture.'

Luckraft rolled his eyes. He was perhaps recalling that the Right Reverend had shown little stomach for his chrismal task when he had first performed it (the Rector had made an attempt - unusually, for him, an abortive one - to discourage and then evade the Bale sisters' ultramontanist requirements altogether), and was unlikely to be pleased at being summoned to do the whole job all over again. He had even, in reference to the Misses Bale, muttered something about Aholah and Aholibah, a tantrum which had struck Luckraft, when at last he succeeded in locating these two mixes in the Old Testament, as erring on the side of exaggeration.

From these not particularly timely reflections he awoke to the realization that Titty Bale had given over her brooding on Satanas, and was now eyeing him expectantly.

'Well, don't just stand there like a dumpling, Luckraft,' she said. ‘Go inside and get on with your detecting, or whatever it is you do.'

The assembled crowd vibrated on a note in which Luckraft was now certain he could sense an element of censoriousness.
Why doesn't he do something, then? Ignorant Dogberry! Useless bumpkin! Calls himself a copper and doesn't even know where to start!

Jerkily, like some mechanical toy too cack-handedly activated, Luckraft flung himself at the tent flap and disappeared inside.

It was two hours later - past six o'clock - when Fen at last got back home to the Dickinsons' cottage.

Police activity, though competent as far as it went, had had a provisional air, as of an organization marking time tidily enough, but with no very clear notion as to the direction in which it would be most profitable to move. Following a brief personal inspection, Luckraft had left the Hulland twins in charge of the corpse, had sought out the Major and had asked permission to use the telephone in the Major's flat, in whose
doorway he had met Thouless emerging, flushed with triumph at having made contact with Dr Mason, and summoned him back. Luckraft had then, keeping the Major's cocker bitch Sal at bay with well-judged kicks, rung up the police station in Glazebridge, given an account of the new enormity now brought to light in the Botticelli tent, and asked for instructions.

These directed him to sentry duty at the gate, where he took up his stand, fending off questions and preventing people from leaving; the latter precaution struck everyone, Luckraft himself included, as pointless, since by simply ducking through a twin-strand wire fence you could leave the lawn, and beyond that the Aller House grounds as a whole, practically anywhere. In general, however, the Fête's clientèle was showing more inclination to linger than to quit. Thanks to Titty Bale - who by now, to judge from her utterances, had come to regard what had happened as in some obscure fashion aimed at discrediting the Botticelli - news of the fresh murder, Burraford's second in two months, was spreading through the crowd like flame on a blowy day through an expanse of dry bracken, and almost everybody was anxious to stay and find out more. The lack of solid information, a Barmecides' banquet to curious appetites, was tantalizing. No one could be certain who the corpse was, or how it had come by its end, or by whose malice; Titty Bale notwithstanding, no one could be certain, even, if it was a man or a woman; and with Luckraft baffling all inquisition by the simple process of slowly and silently shaking his head, it was clearly necessary to remain on the scene until something substantial emerged. Meanwhile, and much to the Rector's annoyance, the stalls and sideshows found themselves virtually deserted, and even the beer tent had emptied. As to Arthur, his mishap with the Try-Your-Strength machine was overshadowed wholly; attended by no more than a rag-end of his former numerous sympathizers, he continued, though now largely disregarded, to lie on the turf where he had fallen, exuding unrequited pathos, breathing plangently and holding a handkerchief to his head to staunch the bleeding.

His injury was not - said Dr Mason, reappearing presently in response to Thouless's telephone call - anything to worry about, so long as he went home as soon as possible and rested, and kept
off the bottle for a bit; reassured by this intelligence, Arthur staggered to his feet and tottered over to a chair, where he sat blinking and grunting in residual confusion while he was swabbed and patched up. His act of mercy completed, Dr Mason closed his bag, exchanged a few words with Luckraft, and then strolled phlegmatically across the lawn to the Botticelli tent, to await the arrival of the police reinforcements from Glazebridge.

These came on the scene ten minutes later; they consisted of Detective-Inspector Widger, two constables from the uniformed branch and Detective-Constable Rankine, who had beguiled the journey with a spoken catalogue of various hypotheses which he considered might apply to the situation confronting them.

‘Seventhly,' he was saying as the police car jolted up to the gateway, ‘the crime was committed by Hagberd, who has escaped from Rampton. But to this theory we can see objections. They are threefold. In the first place, Hagberd has probably
not
escaped from Rampton, or we should have heard.'

The car stopped. Widger got out of it and went to consult briefly with Luckraft. Delighted at being able to find Rankine something at once tedious and futile to do, he stationed him and one of the constables at the gate, with instructions to take people's names and addresses as they left, detaining only those who were blood-boltered or in overt possession of offensive weapons. He then, with Luckraft and the remaining constable, made his way across the lawn to join Dr Mason in the Botticelli tent.